Posted on 04/13/2010 2:01:04 PM PDT by Winged Hussar
Today, the facts about Katyn are not in doubt. In the spring of 1940, 22,000 Polish prisoners of war—most of them army officers, but also thousands of leading members of the Polish intelligentsia—were systematically murdered by the Soviet secret police on direct orders from Joseph Stalin.
...In one of history's richer ironies, the massacre was first discovered and publicized by the Nazis in 1943. That made it that much easier for the Soviets to dismiss the revelation as German propaganda to cover up a German crime, a line the U.S. and Britain were only too happy to adopt to propitiate their wartime ally. The behavior of the Roosevelt administration was particularly disgraceful: As Rutgers Professor Adam Scrupski has noted, the U.S. Office of War Information "implicitly threatened to remove licensure from the Polish language radio stations in Detroit and Buffalo if they did not cease broadcasting the details of executions."
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
“should have restrained the Allied war effort (and aid to the USSR), allowed the Nazis and Communists to fight to the death, and then finished off whichever was left standing”
One prob, American GIs and treasure were used to clean up the european mess, so makes sense to do it the way that was best for AMERICA, not the best way for Poland, Germany, England,, etc. Do you have any idea how many more GIs would have died to defeat a Red Army that had just defeated the Nazis. OR to defeat a Nazi army that had prevailed in conquering the USSR?
That would have been a meatgrinder unfair to ask an American to die in. Better to join up like we did, wipe out the Nazis, then deal with a cold war. MUCH cheaper in American blood to do what we did.
http://lamecherry.blogspot.com/2010/04/polish-assassination-in-theory.html
It kinda worked out for us though. More sucky for Europeans, but heck, THEY created the whole stinking mess in the first place. The Germans lost about 75% of their soldiers on the Eastern front. The unsavory alliance with the USSR actually served us well. More better that they fight all those nazis, than they were all sitting on Omaha beach waiting for us with freshly oiled weapons.
Churchill also had a hand in the assassination of General Sikorski.
“Well, he did need the Russians to not only hamper the Germans on their eastern front, but to also provide a diversion to occupy Japan. Basically, the enemy of my enemies is my friend, so I can understand the downplaying of this.”
I can’t see as how Japan was diverted. They were pretty busy handling that whole conquering the Pacific world thing at the time. As for Germany, what, were the commies not going to fight back when the nazis invaded them had Roosevelt allowed Americans to be critical? Okay, we didn’t know at the time that the nazis would invade (though it wouldn’t take a Nostradamus to guess). But what would we expect preventing Americans from criticizing the Soviet’s to benefit us had they not? Would it make them more likely to enter the war on their own terms? What would Stalin care about Polish immigrant groups thousands of miles away? What would he care about the American leadership, for that matter? Why would we sway him one way or another?
After we had exerted our power across the globe and entered the world elite after the war, we ended up (temporarily) licking their boots and it got us nothing. Nothing! I hardly think licking their boots beforehand made any difference, either.
“It is not like our country has not overlooked things before or since fdr. Crap, look at all the trash countries we are in bed with today, whether it be for business or the war on terror”
True as that may be, I’m at a loss as to why we’d have bothered with the commies at the time. I realize the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but the Soviets were either going to go on being buddies with the nazis or they weren’t. We had, so far as I can see, absolutely no say in the matter. You can argue that, assuming the Soviets cared a fig about what some random American citizens said (which is a huge assumption), had we dishonored them they would have been less apt to deal with us in the future. Except if you’ll recall, we had this 50 years of what people called a “cold war” with them anyway, despite our politeness.
And then, FDR signed the Yalta accord condemming much of Europe to Communist oppression for another 50 years.
He was no friend of “free men”.
“I agree, but by raising a stink over 20,000 Pols may have caused many times that in American/Allied lives, if not the war.”
What? That makes no sense. If the Soviets had abandoned the allies because of it, the Germans would have invaded them anyway. And, fine, we didn’t know that, but you’re forgetting how little we mattered at the time. No way the Soviets alter their grand strategies based on how nice we are to them. All that, and the Soviets were sorta used to being outcasts at the time, which partly explains why they were so willing to team up with their sworn enemies and fellow oucast Germans. We didn’t even recognize them as a legitimate country until shortly before that point, so forgive me if I doubt whether they’d be very upset if we shouted about their evil from the rooftops. They hated us in any case, if you happened to miss the next half-century after the war.
“Do you have any idea how many more GIs would have died to defeat a Red Army that had just defeated the Nazis. OR to defeat a Nazi army that had prevailed in conquering the USSR?”
I can’t imagine it would’ve been much worse. The Soviets in ‘45, or whenever they’d have bested the nazis, would’ve been in worse shape, I bet, than the nazis in ‘44. Likewise the nazis had they beat the commies. People truly lack the proper persepctive as to how thoroughly the European theater of the war was determined by the nazi/commie conflict. The casualties there were astronomically greater than what resulted from the clash between the Americans/British/French/Dutch/etc. and Germans.
“Better to join up like we did, wipe out the Nazis, then deal with a cold war.”
Yeah, but we didn’t really “deal with” the cold war. We just let the commies sit there. Which kinda made killing all those nazis worthless, because we didn’t lift a finger to stop the guys who swooped in and did the exact same thing.
“The eastern front was pretty much where the German soldier died in that war.”
Which had absolutely NOTHING to do with U.S.-Soviet relations. Either they would have gone to war with Germany or not. How they felt about us had nothing to do with it.
Re: “Do you have any idea how many more GIs would have died to defeat a Red Army that had just defeated the Nazis. OR to defeat a Nazi army that had prevailed in conquering the USSR?”
The Nazi army that had conquered the USSR (and Hitler couldn’t have used his whole army with, for example, the U.S. and British Armies on his borders in France) would have been thinned out by a couple of million men, thus making it easy to defeat. The same for a Red Army that, without U.S. and British aid, succeeded in invading Germany.
What I meant was that, after liberating France, we should have let the Nazis and Communists do most of the dying at each others’ hands, and then finished off the winner—which we would have had the means to do in August 1945. 20 kilotons on either Berlin or Moscow would probably have done the job.
This would have prevented the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and thus saved something like 80,000 American lives.
At the beginning of the war, something similar in reverse may have been Stalin’s motivation, to let Hitler, the French and the Brits wipe each other out, and then scoop up the pieces. It didn’t quite work out as planned, but he did manage to scoop up half of Europe anyway.
It was a blessing in disguise that the French capitulated as quickly as they did, or else Stalin’s plans would have come to fruition.
We would have benefited greatly from healthy cynicism and paranoia impacting all our contacts with Stalin. The treaty in 1939 between Stalin and Hitler should have been the guiding light for all our subsequent negotiations.
True the Europeans behaved very badly. The French watered their pants as Jodl invaded the Rhineland with only three battalions.
Particularly, the Polish got the shaft. They provided key insights into breaking the Enigma code, and on the day when Britain committed all its fighter reserves to defeating the Luftwaffe, they piloted one of every ten of the Hurricanes and Spitfires.
>20 kilotons on either Berlin or Moscow would probably have >done the job.
Pure speculative nonsense. We didn’t have the weapons to spare on what was the successfully concluded European War.
>This would have prevented the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and >thus saved something like 80,000 American lives.
More nonsense. Starting a war with Soviet Russia would have
been cvriminally insane with an active invasion of Japan
imminent.
The Western world was close to the end of the tether. Britain in terms of treasure, US in terms of the resources
and manpower devoted to war, munitions and other activities
that weren’t making our economy greater.
Honestly, some of the revisonism in this forum is breathtaking. May some people need to discuss with some
WWII vets who were up close and personal with the whole thing.
Another topic is about why it was good that we nuked Japan is that it avoided us having to fight in Japan twice.
By that, I mean had we not dropped the bomb, and instead had to invade Japan, most likely the Soviets would have also been part of the invasion. And most likely there would have been an agreement to divide Japan, ala Germany, Korea, and Vietnam. Then there would have been a Japanese Civil War, between Communist North Japan, and US-backed South Japan, just as in Korea.
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